Falmouth robberies- UPDATE

It was revealed last Monday that there is to be an armed police response unit in Falmouth, following the robberies that took place last month.  You can read more about  what Inspector John Trott and his oppossers,  had to say on this on This Is Plymouth.

armed robbery- a Falmouth anomaly

This is a CCTV image of the armed robbery that took place Sunday 23rd November 2008 at the Spar on Albany rd., Falmouth.

The Friday before, The Woodlane Social, also in Falmouth was robbed by an hooded criminal brandishing a baseball bat. Both of these establishments are on my doorstep.

So the logical thing, was to try and find out what is going on. This led me to making a short package on serious crime and media manipulation.

the investigation

I spoke to Odette Sharp, the young girl who was working late that Sunday night. As a victim of an alleged firearm assault, how did she feel?- How does she feel now about overall crime in Falmouth? did this event give her a skewed view of how things really are?

I also contacted Devon and Cornwall Police and spoke to the senior explosives and firearms clerk to get an idea about who owns guns, what punishments and measures are in place to deter illegal gun trading and to find out whether the perception we have of firearms is correct.

I then took to the streets for some vox pops and asked the public what they’re views are on the subject because I wanted to know how this event affected the community and whether the way the media handled violent crime influenced the way they thought.

investigating crime

By own admission, my 1:30 audio piece was hardly comprehensive and I dare not use the term exhaustive.

It is good practice before an investigation is commissioned and before seeking editorial approval and legal advice to consider the following:

• background and motivation of sources.
• justification for using deception, undercover work or secret recording to gather further evidence.
• whether this is the only way to proceed.
• possible consequences of our actions.

I did a bit of background research after I had done my piece and the set of codes of conduct above came up. These are are from the BBC website and I am therefore assuming they are  accepted industry-wide, as good-practice guidelines.

Though the middle points did not really apply to my ‘investigation’ – when it comes to my packages, this is still something of a tenuous term- it did get me thinking about how we ‘package’ information and present it to the public. What is my agenda? what is my source’s motivation  for divulging information? are they giving me a factual account of the situation?  and what is my audience feeling after hearing the piece. Did they think it was balanced?, did I shine new light on gun crime/its perception?

Unfortunately I do not have clearance to make the audio publicly available, but in future I’d like to try and adhere to the above guidelines and float these questions, to really get me thinking about the piece, and what it is actually about. I will try and put a good-practice checklist before my next assignment and see how much of it I can stick to and where discrepancies occur in practice.

the law

My understanding of investigative journalism so far, is that it  will involve defamation, whistle-blowing and maybe curtailing the law if necessary, in the name of public interest. So a good understanding of the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, Reynold’s Defense, Human Rights Articles and their derogations  (particularly 6, 8 & 10) and an overall basic understanding of how legal frameworks affect reporters, is vital.

I am also looking forward to considering absolute/ qualified privilege and what balanced, accurate and contemporaneous journalism means.

Baby’s first piece of investigative journalism

I have mentioned my journo skills lecture in the past, as a force I had to contend with. Something that sparked an internal struggle in me to accept why blogging is the right tool to convey my stories. I was just not convinced that tip-tapping on my laptop and speculating about what he-said, she-said, was the best way to learn the skills I will need to be a through journalist. But last week was different.

Charlotte, our lecturer, told us she too was sick of us ripping stuff off the wires, tired of us parroting news site editorials and appalled by our endless press release rewrites. Score! (except her speech was not quite as invigorating, still this is what I took from her rants…)Then she presented us with a 25-page piece of research,  the entire script of a politician’s rebuttal and a 3rd primary source and told us to find the story. Well, I’m the first to admit this was not done without whinging and moaning at the sheer amount of rubbish one has to go through in order to find the goods, but anyway i got on with it and like to think I went above and beyond the call of duty.

Drugs

The Dr. Roberts 25 pager was a killer. What caught my eye though, was not that fat people no longer just live up North, but the sponsors of the report. This apparently medically-sound and authoritative research, was commissioned by Roche Product Ltd.

Whilst the report told us that people in the Shetland Islands are the fattest in the land and provided a damning verdict on our primary health care (your doctors and nurses), it danced around the issue of assisted weight loss (through medication). However, it provided figures and stats to say that actually, certain types of pills were proven to help patients lose between 5-10% of body weight and that they have beneficial effects on diabetes and cholesterol. It quoted the NICE, the NOF, the BJM, the RCP and a bunch of other letters that have little relevance to you and I. There just wasn’t a real balance to what he was saying, but simply that we do not have enough data to disprove these findings. So this when I decided to retrace my steps and went back to see who had commissioned the report.

Roche aims to improve the health, quality of life and well-being of people in the UK. We do this through our innovative range of diagnostic and pharmaceutical products that focus on the needs of individuals.

Bingo.

When I started digging around, and again I’ll be honest I did this over the one hour we were given, I found that the sponsors clearly had an invested interest in pharmacotherpay. I was ecstatic at this discovery and told Charlotte. She, though, dismissed what I said and told me to write the story. I’ll be honest this left me a bit deflated and feeling a bit silly about about my investigations.

The aftermath

What was to come though, was glory and the respect of my classmates. Jules a friend of mine, had already pointed out that the ‘fat map’ was unquantifiable- which had raised alarm bells earlier- and so I told her about the above. We started looking around and discovered that the report had been dismissed since. Score.

So yeah, I told Charlotte this, and yeah she looked into it and pointed out that it was the ‘Shetland Times’ that were protesting and NOT because Roche had sponsored this. Dammit.

Oh Well. So people were not complaining that this influential piece of research was bias, but more concerned that it made their region look bad. Great. Just Great.

It was not Watergate I’ll admit. But irregardless of my rookie mistakes, I thought I had done something special that afternoon. So much so, that I am ‘tip-tapping’ away on my blog (!) at 7am on a Wednesday morning. And yeah I wrote about how the affluent down south are getting fatter, and yeah, Charlotte was pleased. But I still dispute that what I found that afternoon was the real story.

A Simple Blogging Phillipic (Or I Was Lyndon Johnsoned Into Susbmission)

Aaah the blog… After last week’s musing on blogging and my apparent realisation that blogging wasn’t actually all that bad, that it offered the hopeful ideal of democratic journalism that I had been searching for- I have lapsed. The contention is one of interest. Whose interest is it in that I blog? My want to feed the public news? cathartic relief from daily frustrations? future employers, maybe? I don’t know, maybe all of those things.

But I have found that it is a weirdly compelling thing, blogging. Even when you think that everything you could want to say has been said already in the newsroom, in the dailies, on the web; you feel that with a blog you could say something new on Obama’s presidential election. You can use your voice to comment on issues that matter to you.  Mike Wesch, digital ethnographer extraordinaire, has been an eye-opener. Check out His video  it really does show what a dynamic force the Internet can be. 

So what’s stopping me from running riot with this and using it to mobilise the masses?  Maybe its because I am aware of issues like circulation and commitment- That is, that realistically a worthwhile blog is one that is consistently updated, and one that is crafted with the reader in mind (Who isreading my blog??). The circulation thing, is a daunting one for any cyber journo- we are automatically disadvantaged because there is no advertising money propelling us to the front line… I do,  however, think that this negative aspect is precisely what makes blogging attractive to me- the freedom of being able to say what I want to say, without editorial restriction!

Alright, blogs! you rock! Now, the next issue to tackle is my technical handicap… how can a technically illiterate journo wade through the murky and confusing world of links, add-ons and media enhancing tools?

receiving transmission…

I was asked to write this blog. At first I was against writing it. In fact, I think I pretty much, still am.  Our journalism skills lecture today, however, cornered me into having to think about blogs and why people blog. I think my main issue with blogging perhaps, is that in a virtual world of Twitters, Technorati and a cacophony of other online communications tools, I am struggling to understand their place and how blogging can enhance the life of a paranoid, fiercely private, busy and above all, sceptical trainee journo.

“Well, BBC’s Robert Peston has one” I was told. Granted, it is fair to say, that I have considerable amount of time at my disposal compare to Peston or ooh say, David Cameron. I am not breaking financial news or leading a political party at the moment, but then I don’t have an awful lot to sound-off about. I don’t hold status and I cannot offer measured insight on social issues. So where does that leave the lowly individual? I can post comments on topics that are of interest to me and feel smug about outsmarting user darth_101 on all things Tarantino,  on a million message boards already. I can too, reply to embarrassing posts where I am able to offer or seek advice anonymously. But a blog is different. 

Blogging to me, until recently was the pass-time of self-interested and uninteresting naval-gazers, too involved in their private affairs to look around and realise that the world had not quite come down crashing and burning with the end of their relationship. I thought of blogging as the emo of communication tools if you will. 

But being introduced to the blogs of citizen journalists and other hackademics has changed my views a little and even as I write this post and philosophise on the irony of this exercise, I allow myself to consider blogging not so much as an over-exposed journal but as a sort of utopian, grassroots soapbox where people can break and anlyse their own news.

This makes me think that maybe I do have something valuable to contribute. I mean, I do have opinions and maybe my next post will shed a little more light on blogging and blogs and hopefully, I’ll find my voice and my audience in the process.